“I don’t know. The power is off. Get up, get up, girl!”
Marija groaned and pushed herself up into a sitting position. She was twenty-six years of age and her mother still called her ‘girl’! She let it pass. She loved her Mama dearly and sometimes felt guilty for not being the respectful, obedient, dutiful daughter that her mother still expected her to be, even in this modern world. Mothers, she consoled herself, could not stop being mothers even when their brood was fully fledged and able to fend for themselves. Of course, her Mama had never expected her only daughter to break those shackles in the way her brothers, Samuel, and latterly, Joseph, had broken free in the normal way of all sons. Daughters were different, particularly daughters who’d lived the life that she had lived. Marija sighed and began to rouse herself, stiffly from her bed.
In Sliema Creek a ship blew its whistle. The sound reverberated around the house, rattling windows.
Marija shook off her mother’s supporting arm.
“I’m getting up. I’m getting up,” she protested, rising unsteadily to her feet and shrugging the creases out of her long cotton nightdress. She understood why her mother was still so protective but sometimes it irked her intolerably. She wasn’t an invalid and she hadn’t been one for many years. She wasn’t a child any more either although she suspected that in her mother’s eyes she would always be twelve years old. Marija would bear the terrible scars of her crippling childhood injuries for the rest of her life but she hated it when she was treated as if she wasn’t fully capable of looking after herself. “Go! Go! Stop fussing over me, Mama!”
Her mother departed huffily.
Marija pulled the curtains aside from her bedroom window. Unable to see anything she went out into the hallway to see what she could see from that vantage point. The Cambridge Barracks astride nearby Tigne Point were a blaze of floodlights, the parade ground and vehicle park dazzlingly illuminated. As she watched a helicopter — a Westland Wessex — swooped in to land in the centre of the open space, and ant-like figures scurried away from it stooping beneath the churning rotors, before the machine lifted into the air and thrummed across Marsamxett to disappear in the night over Valetta.
“Marija!” Her mother called, angrily.
“I’m coming!” She returned to her room and slipped on her sandals, pulled a summer overcoat from her sparsely populated wardrobe over her nightdress and went to the head of the stairs. Her left leg ached but she limped only slightly and the back pains from yesterday — when she’d spent almost the whole day on her feet at the hospital — were mercifully absent. “I’m coming!”
She went down the stairs with a confidence that astounded those who’d heard her story but who didn’t actually know her. Her hand rested on the old, warped oaken banister rail but only as an afterthought, just in case she slipped as now and then, happened. Marija Elizabeth Calleja had learned when she was young that life wasn’t about how many times one fell over; it was about how quickly one picked oneself up afterwards.
The Calleja family had moved into the old house in Sliema eight years ago. After the war they’d lived in an apartment in Mdina but when Marija’s father had been promoted to Under Manager of what was still, in those days, the Royal Naval Dockyard at Senglea, he’d wanted to be closer to both his office and the British headquarters, HMS Phoenicia on Manoel Island. There’d been some talk at the time of the family moving back to Vittoriosa-Birgu — which would have been right next to the dockyards — but Marija’s mother had never been back to the place where in 1941 her brother, sister and her uncle had died, and where she’d almost lost her only daughter, Marija.
Marija was about to follow her mother and her youngest brother, Joe, down into the cellar when the strident howl of another ship’s steam whistle reverberated across the harbour. On an impulse she ducked out of the front door onto the main street where she had a view straight down the avenue of buildings to a small sliver of Sliema Creek.
When she’d returned home for the weekend — this month her ‘weekend’s as defined by the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women’s nursing rota fell on a Sunday and a Monday — the previous evening there had been four big, grey destroyers at anchor. She’d lingered on the waterfront, sat a while on the sea wall and enjoyed the feel of the sun on her face as it set over the lumpy towers of the hospital at Msida, allowing herself the time and the space to think her own thoughts. Her thoughts had drifted, turning slowly around the many good things in her world.
Lately, every time she laid eyes on the ships of the 7th Destroyer Squadron with their ugly, ungainly bedstead radars and their long, gun-bristling hulls she thought about Peter Christopher.
HMS Talavera was a sister to two of the destroyers currently based in Sliema Creek, and inevitably she’d begun to wonder if one day, maybe soon, she’d be sent to Malta — carrying Peter Christopher — to relieve one or other of her sisters. Of course, she didn’t — ever — let her thoughts run too far ahead. The immutable lesson of her life was that one had to walk before one tried to run. She knew Peter had had sweethearts in England, and once, one in Simonstown, in far away South Africa. She knew also that the life of a career naval officer was hardly compatible with her own, very singular…circumstances. Yet, every time she looked at those beautiful, deadly ships moored in Sliema Creek she allowed herself to dream her dreams. Always a voice in her head told her those dreams would be her secrets forever; that nothing would ever come of them but that didn’t matter. She’d discovered when she was a girl — imprisoned hopelessly in one hospital bed after another for what had seemed like eternity — that a world without dreams was a world without hope.
Without hope there was nothing.
Marija stared down the arrow straight street to the darkly glinting waters of the Creek. A tug was dragging the bow of HMS Scorpion off its mooring buoy. She often watched the destroyers slipping their lines, edging out towards the sea. Always, the evolutions were smoothly choreographed, unhurried. Tonight, men were running about the decks in…panic. The Scorpion’s sharp prow — pointing out into Marsamxett — began to move. A vehicle hooted behind her and she stepped close to the wall of her house as several British soldiers jogged down the hill.
What was going on?
It was a defining characteristic of the British presence — her little brother Joe called it ‘the occupation’ — on Malta that ships and troops didn’t hurry anywhere. Certainly not in the middle of the night and never ever in the small hours of a Sunday morning. If Malta was in any sense ‘occupied’ the occupiers were as a rule at pains not to overly inconvenience the civil population in any way. Brave little Malta had gone through so much to help the British win the war and memories were long. Marija owed her survival and the fact that she was able to live the life she wanted to a remarkable British Naval Surgeon, without whose intervention she’d have lived out her years in a cot, gazing at the world passing her by. Quite apart from her feelings for a certain Englishman — Peter Christopher — whom she’d never actually met or spoken to but whose existence inevitably coloured her view of England and the British, notwithstanding the widespread yearning for real Maltese independence, she hoped the British would stay forever. If not as rulers then as protectors and friends; firebrands like her foolish little brother might spout all manner of anti-colonial rhetoric but most Maltese took a more pragmatic, and yes, sentimental view of these things. So, to see the British running around in what they’d call ‘a funk’ was more than a little unnerving.
A great gout of steam issued from the funnel of a tug ramming its snout under HMS Scorpion’s bow. Marija realised that the destroyer was swinging unnaturally close to the waterfront. With a tingling jolt of icy anxiety she realised the big ship must have cut her cables.